24th April 2025 - Create More. Consume Less
Hello, beautiful souls and welcome to today's takeaway and contemplation. So I'm going to start this off with saying focus less on consumption and more on creation. You are a business owner and you are using social media and online spaces as a marketing tool, as a marketer, you are here to create and interact and engage with your audience, but that does not mean that you need to be tied to your mobile phone or your laptop all day long. And honestly, it's so easy to let that habit and addiction of the social media world draw you in to spending far more hours than you need to actually consuming content rather than creating it and responding to your audience. So what I'm going to say here is that it's not just about the addiction to social media, but it's about the effects that that has on first of all, our mental health.
(00:58)
So constantly looking for likes, constantly looking for validation. If you find yourself scrolling through other people's content, especially people within your industry or niche or people that are also entrepreneurs, you may find yourself getting caught up in the comparison game, seeing how well people are doing and comparing yourself, judging yourself, letting the little inner critic creep in. You might find yourself being swayed to try something somebody else's way because it seems to be working for them, and maybe it'll work for you too. And you start to lose that connection with your inner compass because again, the outside world becomes the authority and the standard that you're judging yourself by, rather than your own design and who you are designed to be. There's also our physical health. So when we spend a lot of time on screens, we get this beautiful little dopamine here, but it's not a long lasting dopamine here, and it can lead to these peaks and troughs in our wellbeing.
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Spending a lot of time on screens actually sends our nervous system into dysregulation. Every time you hear that little ping or that little notification. This also sends our system into a alert mode. So we spend a lot of time in fight or flight when we're on our screens. This can lead to sensations of anxiety, it can lead to headaches, it can lead to all sorts of physical symptoms, and of course that mental fatigue. So we can start to get that brain fog. We can start to find ourselves very confused, and all of this is detrimental to you actually growing and is scaling and expanding your business as well as being detrimental to your health.
(02:33)
And so there are very good reasons to create strong boundaries around your social media use. I highly recommend picking the times that you are going to check in on your notification and respond to anything that needs responding to and choose those times. Set a timer. So let's say you allow yourself 15 minutes to go in and respond to everything. Set the timer, go in and respond, and when the time stops, you shut down Facebook, you shut down social media and you get on with the rest of your life. Also, set strict boundaries. Like when I go to post content, I go to post content. I don't go, Ooh, what's this in my feed? And what's that in my feed? I'm really specific about what I'm going into these apps to do, and I go in, do it and get back out again. Now, don't get me wrong, I do use social media to have a look and to scroll sometimes, but I ensure that I do this outside of my work hours and inside the time that feels good for me. So that might be late night when I'm laying on the sofa and I finish my work. The kids are in bed. Now I want to do a little bit of me personal time, and some of that's going to be some social media stuff. That's all perfectly cool. But when it comes to your work hours, treat them as sacred. You do not want to be attached to your phone all day long. So there's just a couple of things to think about. Remember, you are a creator, not a consumer. That's what you're here for.
